WorldCat

It is a privilege to be able to participate and contribute to various boards.  It is also a way to learn new things, meet interesting people, and gain new perspectives. That has certainly been the case since I joined the board of OCLC. Fifteen years ago some pundits — myself not included — were saying that libraries were history — as in toast — they were not long for the emerging digital world. Been to a local or college library lately? They are full of people and many are expanding their facilities. Library use has doubled over the past decade. What happened to the digital “vision”? It turns out that the digital and physical can get along together quite well.

The month after I graduated from Lehigh University in 1967, OCLC — Online Computer Library Center, Inc. –  was founded  in Dublin, Ohio as a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purpose of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs for libraries. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. Each of these five verbs has special and profound meaning to a very large number of librarians and library visitors.

The crown jewel of OCLC is WorldCat – the world’s most comprehensive database of resources held in libraries, connecting millions of users to the collections and services of thousands of libraries around the globe. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of WorldCat. On August 26, 1971, the OCLC Online Union Catalog and Shared Cataloging system (now known as WorldCat) began operation. That first day, from a single terminal connected to a mainframe computer, catalogers at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, cataloged 133 books online. Today, WorldCat comprises more than 240 million records representing more than 1.7 billion items in OCLC member libraries worldwide. WorldCat.org lets you search not just the collections of libraries in your community but thousands more around the world.

“We congratulate the thousands of librarians and catalogers around the world who have helped to build WorldCat over the past 40 years keystroke by keystroke, record by record,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO.  Jay said that Fred Kilgour, the founding director of OCLC, had a vision to improve access to information through library cooperation, and the vision is every bit as vital today as it was in 1971. WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information that is being continuously enhanced by OCLC libraries around the world. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogs, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. With budget pressures at all levels, the OCLC cataloging, resource sharing services, and library management systems are critical tools to assist librarians to improve productivity, save money, and improve access to the collections of their libraries.

WorldCat records span more than 5,000 years of recorded knowledge, from about 3400 B.C. to the present. The unique collection of information encompasses records in a variety of formats—books, e-books, DVDs, digital resources, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files. Like the knowledge it describes, WorldCat grows steadily. Library members add seven records to the WorldCat database every seven seconds. Take a minute and visit worldcat.org and enter the title of your favoirte book to see the breadth and depth of this great resource.

OCLC Homepage
WorldCat

Tags: board of directors, board of trustees, jay jordan, kilgour, libraries, library, oclc, web management services, worldcat

OCLC in Seattle

It is a privilege to be able to participate and contribute to various boards.  It is also a way to learn new things, meet interesting people, and gain new perspectives. That has certainly been the case since I joined the board of OCLC. The board held a special meeting in Seattle this month. I got there a day early to meet some relatives in the area, one of which just started a new career with Amazon. More on that another time. The early arrival also made it possible to visit the 1962 World’s Fair Space Needle. I can not resist commenting on some of the engineering aspects of the futuristic Needle. The underground foundation was poured into a hole 30 feet deep and 120 feet across and it took 467 cement trucks an entire day to fill it. The foundation weighs as much as the Space Needle itself  and provide sa center of gravity just above ground. The revolving restaurant was balanced so perfectly that it can rotate with a one horsepower electric motor. The 605-foot tall Needle has elevators that travel 10 mph, 14 feet per second, 800 feet per minute, or as fast as a raindrop falls to earth. A snowflake falls at 3 mph, so when you go up during a snowstorm it appears to be snowing up. The Needle is built to withstand a 200 mph wind and in 2001 it easily withstood an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale.

The OCLC board of trustees and CEO Jay Jordan spent all day Sunday in committee meetings and then Monday in the board meeting. I always learn a lot at OCLC meetings. Fifteen years ago some pundits — myself not included — were saying that libraries were history — as in toast — they were not long for the emerging digital world. Been to a local or college library lately? They are full of people and many are expanding their facilities. Library use has doubled over the past decade. What happened to the digital “vision”? It turns out that the digital and physical can get along together quite well and OCLC is playing a key role in helping libraries adapt to the changes ahead.

Since OCLC announced it was making its cloud-based library management services available to early adopters just 10 months ago, 32 libraries have committed to using OCLC Web-scale Management Services (WMS), the Web-based cooperative library management tools for meta-data management, acquisitions, circulation, license management and work-flow improvement. The early-adopter phase has now ended, and July 1 will mark general release of these innovative cloud-based services. The big picture idea behind WMS is to offer member libraries a single unified solution to help streamline routine tasks—like acquisitions and circulation. By moving these functions to the Web, libraries are able to share infrastructure costs and resources, as well as collaborate in ways that free them from the restrictions of local hardware and software.

On our final day in Seattle, we were fortunate to have a tour of Microsoft Research. Lee Dirks, director of Education & Scholarly Communication in Microsoft’s External Research division graciously hosted our visit. Lee was Microsoft’s archivist from 1996-1999 and before that was Preservation Services Manager at OCLC from 1995-96. Now that I am a student again, I found the academic search project Lee’s team is working on to be quite interesting. Academic Search is a free engine developed by Microsoft Research Asia to help users quickly find information about academic researchers and their activities. It is also a test-bed for their object-level vertical search research. With Academic Search, you can find top researchers, their papers, conferences, journals, and even relationships between researchers who may be co-authoring papers.

OCLC Homepage
WorldCat

Tags: board of directors, board of trustees, libraries, library, microsoft, microsoft research, oclc, seattle, space needle, wms, worldcat

OCLC Annual Report

It is a privilege to be able to participate and contribute
to various boards.  It is also a way to learn new things, meet interesting people, and gain new perspectives. That has certainly been the case since I joined the board of OCLC (press release). Fifteen years ago some pundits — myself not included — were saying that libraries were history — as in toast — they were not long for the emerging digital world. Been to a local or college library lately? They are full of people and many are expanding their facilities. Library use has doubled over the past decade. What happened to the digital “vision”? It turns out that the digital and physical can get along together quite well.

The month after I graduated from Lehigh University in 1967, OCLC — Online Computer Library Center, Inc. –  was founded  in Dublin, Ohio as a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purpose of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs for libraries. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. Each of these five verbs has special and profound meaning to a very large number of librarians and library visitors.

WorldCat allows you to search for books, music CDs and videos — all of the physical items you’re used to getting from libraries — but you can also discover downloadable audiobooks, article citations with links to their full text, authoritative research materials, and digital versions of rare items that aren’t available to the public. Some libraries allow you to join a waiting list, reserve the item, check it out or even have it shipped or delivered. WorldCat also leverages the social computing model by allowing you to enter ratings and reviews and contribute factual notes. The more people enter the more useful WorldCat becomes. That is their model — enhancing the sharing of information on a global basis. The vision is “The world’s libraries. Connected.” To learn more about OCLC, take a look at their new Annual Report.

OCLC Homepage
WorldCat

Tags: board of directors, board of trustees, libraries, library, oclc, worldcat

e-tirement

I was browsing through Pulse on the iPad reading the news and happened upon my friend Irving’s post “Reflections on the “Post-Retirement” Phase of My Life“. It reminded me that I have been meaning to write something similar about my “e-tirement”, a term coined by Irving back in 2001 when I e-tired. Irving wrote his reflection after three years and I have yet to write mine after nearly nine years. This is the problem with “retiring” — there just isn’t enough time to do all you want to do. It reminds me of a reflection by a retired friend who said that he needed to go back to work so that he would have more spare time. This post is intended to share what e-tirement is all about for this one fellow traveler.

For many people, the shift from full-time employment is all about golf. Nothing wrong with that and I can see how happy it makes many people. I played golf once. It was in August 1976 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. That was enough — the day confirmed that golf was not for me and I still do not see it in my future. Like Irving, I have found the shift to be from one primary focus area at one company to multiple focus areas with multiple organizations. As I say on my homepage, I am fortunate to have quite a few affiliations and I get to work with people from whom I am constantly learning.

Serving on boards, both corporate and non-profit, is a very rewarding experience. Not financially — but in the sense that you are able to help with a new idea, or to share an experience that can be helpful. In the old days being a board member meant going to a quarterly meeting and hearing from management and then voting to approve their actions. Governance has evolved significantly and in a positive direction. Directors are expected to read board materials and be prepared for discussion at meetings and to speak out when there is something they don’t understand or agree with. Directors also participate in committees of the board and that is often where more significant ground work takes place. Serving as a member of the planning and technology committees at the regional hospital enables me to be involved at the forefront of the rapid changes in healthcare. Serving on two compensation committees and as chair of the audit committee at two for profit companies is “continuing education”. All things considered I find that board service is a way to remain challenged while at the same time giving back some of the experience gained from nearly four decades at IBM.

When asked for “occupation” on various forms I usually say “consultant” but I don’t make visits and write reports in the classical consulting model. I do maintain a relationship with IBM and act somewhat as an ombudsman at various technology conferences. This enables me to provide an “outsider” perspective to the company from time to time. Not sure if I am an inside outsider or an outside insider. Conferences provide an important dimension of e-tirement for me. Speaking at them or just attending them is a way to stay involved in the industry. There are a lot of good conferences where technologists, investors, business leaders and media come together to network, share ideas, and explore the business impacts of key innovations. Catching up with former colleagues and making new friends is also a highlight. The social networks and many great blogs provide a huge amount of information but there is no substitute for getting together in person and chatting in the hallways during coffee and meal breaks a few times a year. The speaker circuit at company and industry trade group sponsored conferences has suffered an understandable slow down with the economy but hopefully will bounce back during the second half of this year. It has been a privilege to be on the roster of the Washington Speakers Bureau since 2002. Speaking at various not or profit events is also rewarding. Public speaking has been a key part of e-tirement.

And then there are hobbies — so many hobbies, so little time. The patrickWeb blog has many stories about the motorcyling adventures, conducting Beethoven and Mozart, personal computing, gadgets, hiking, geocaching, home automation, reading, and travels. The one hobby that dropped off the list is running — too many marathons and decades of pounding the pavement wore out my knee. Technology came to the rescue and the new oxinium knee has allowed for a full rehabilitation. Although running is not possible, walking and the elliptical cross trainer have enabled me to reach an average 13,000 steps per day — just short of 5 million steps since the new knee was implanted 21 months ago.

All of the hobbies are shared in the blog and, of course, blogging itself is an important hobby. As Irving pointed out, blogging is a way to chronicle one’s activities and connect with many people who have common interests. There are roughly 1,000 stories in patrickWeb dating back to 1998. Someday my grandchildren will find the blog of interest. How about if the Romans and Greeks had been bloggers? What an impact blogging will have hundreds of years from now as researchers try to understand what pepole were thinking and doing way back at the turn of this millenium. I marvel at the research done by Edward Gibbon as he wrote the six volmues of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. As I read his autobiography and also that of Benjamin Franklin recently I thought how awesome it would be if they had been able to blog their thoughts.

I don’t say much in the blog about my wife, our four children, or the three grandchildren (about to be four). I leave it to them to decide what and how they want to share. I will just say that I am proud of them all. Thanks to Irving for inspiring me to write something about e-tirement. Now when I mention the word in future posts I will have a permalink to point to!

Tags: blogging, board, board of directors, board of trustees, Gadgets, governance, hobbies, hospital, IBM, irving wladawsky, irving wladawsky-berger, public speaking, retire, retirement, running, speaking, washington speakers bureau